Tag Archives: learning

It has been nine days since my book was released and I got no complete reviews yet. However, I got a few reviews so far which were conclusive about one thing, I need to learn how to write better, grammar and all. The writing is too formal for literature and unpolished, perhaps something which could be improved by a good editor. Conversations feel unnatural, something which I could get away with considering the genre I write.

Fortunately, my weaknesses can be improved, considering I am willing to dedicate time and effort to make it so. Having creativity makes the learning process bearable, if not enjoyable, because at least I get to do something I am excited about. So far I have been writing and reading a lot, but I have not yet come to study the craft. I will be conducting some research about books/tutorials/lectures to help improve my weak points and let you know about them.

I just want to tell anyone who fancies writing as a hobby and hopes to make something out of it to remain diligent in their pursuit. Rejection letters, bad reviews, writers block and all other caused of frustration are simply unavoidable, at least in your early stages of mastering this craft.

Remember that every great person who ever excelled at a craft had to learn and spend a great deal of effort improving it. If you wrote your first book and fail to publish it or at least get some positive feedback, then don’t blame you undeveloped skill and rather focus on your unrealistic optimism – as opposed to realistic optimism, which makes no sense – for raising your hopes to imaginative levels.

You will write a lot of bullshit before reaping the rewards of your work. Remember the 1,000,000 word mark I talked about in one of my previous posts? Set that as a goal instead of publishing with a traditional publisher. In the meantime, take advantage of the other means available to you.

I have been reading a lot lately and realized that the ending can turn an average book into a masterpiece, or a masterpiece into [a] useless read. The books I tend to enjoy the most are the ones which conclude by leaving you thinking about one statement that summarizes the purpose of the main plot. While this is relatively easy to do in short stories, it becomes somewhat of a challenge for novels.

If not for reading , analyzing, and writing short stories, I would have never reached this conclusion and appreciation to these types of books. However, this does not mean that all other factors of writing are useless, for I still find a good writing style important, but not critical for all genres.

So far my writing journey taught me far more than I expected, in a far shorter time-span than I anticipated. Again, I would recommend others to pick it up as a hobby, or at least try it sometime.

So, I finally decided to actively pursue a hobby. After a long time of thinking and planning, I decided that writing was the most practical hobby that I liked. It took me a month to finish the first draft of my first book titled ‘Book of Kayal – Rise from Exile’. This is the first volume of a saga, which I intend to finish as I learn more about my new hobby.

The hardest part about starting to write a book is coming up with an idea. Once you have a message to convey, it feels that your fingers can’t type fast enough, and there is too much to say.

As soon as I finished the first draft, of about 80k words, I thought that my work was complete. However, I was so terribly wrong, my work was just beginning. In an attempt to learn more about writing, I will be actively trying out new techniques to improve my process. During the time of my learning, I will be documenting the major aspects of learning, as well as the process, in this blog.

Some of my posts will serve as a public journal, one which anyone is welcomed to read and comment on.

Here is the preview of my first book. https://www.createspace.com/pub/community/give.review.do?id=1113694

I recently went into on-line hibernation mode, apologies to my followers regarding that. I finally picked up a practical hobby, writing. About two weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my first book. This book was a fantasy/fictional genre story, aimed at discovering the extent of my imagination capabilities.

It might be interesting for some of you to read about my process for learning how to write, which I will be discovering as I continue writing.